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It's only stalemate 100% of the time if you're a machine. You're not a machine, are you...?
Oh god.
(If I read the Wikipedia article right, there's still a variant that isn't drawn.)
"This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times as complex as Connect Four."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

If I had the time to learn it to a decent level, go/weiqi/baduk. (Or play on kgs frequently enough that I could maintain a free account).
As it is, and from these options, I'd pick chess. Although I've played more FTL: Faster Than Light recently, and with more success than on FICS.

Dave Knott (2917251) writes "After months of speculation since Matt Smith announced that he was exiting the long-running British SF show "Doctor Who", the BBC has announced the latest actor who will be taking on the titular role. In a live television announcement, with several previous stars on hand, it was revealed that Peter Capaldi will be portraying the newest incarnation of The Doctor. Capaldi is 55 years old, ending a recent trend towards younger Doctors, and had been flagged by bookmakers as the odd-on favourite in recent days, to the extent that they had suspended betting on the issue. He is best known for his role as the foul-mouthed government bureaucrat Malcolm Tucker on the "The Thick Of It" and has in fact showed up on Doctor Who previously as a guest star. But now Capaldi is set to take his place in the iconic lead role."Link to Original Source

dryriver (1010635) writes "How much do you like courgettes? According to one Facebook page devoted to them, hundreds of people find them delightful enough to click the "like" button – even with dozens of other pages about courgettes to choose from. There's just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand "likes" at his "click farm". Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year. The ease with which a humble vegetable could win approval calls into question the basis on which many modern companies measure success online – through Facebook likes, YouTube video views and Twitter followers. Channel 4's Dispatches programme will on Monday reveal the extent to which click farms risk eroding user confidence in what had looked like an objective measure of social online approval. The disclosures could hurt Facebook as it tries to persuade firms away from advertising on Google and to use its own targeted advertising, and to chase likes as a measure of approval. The importance of likes is considerable with consumers: 31% will check ratings and reviews, including likes and Twitter followers, before they choose to buy something, research suggests. That means click farms could play a significant role in potentially misleading consumers."Link to Original Source

There's an extra charity to give money to, maybe that's why. Plus probably quite a lot of people want to beat the average to get Signal To Noise. I read it a few years ago, it's pretty good but a bit weird (which could probably describe anything NG's done except for the cannabilism porn).

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Megan Garber writes that in high school, Paul Ryan's classmates voted him as his class's "biggest brown noser," a juicy tidbit that is a source of delight for his political opponents but considered an irrelevant piece of youthful trivia to his supporters. "But it's also a tension that will play out, repeatedly, in the most comprehensive narrative we have about Paul Ryan as a person and a politician and a policy-maker: his Wikipedia page," writes Garber. Late last night, just as news of the Ryan choice leaked in the political press — the first substantial edit to that page removed the "brown noser" mention which had been on the page since June 16. The Wikipedia deletion has given rise to a whole discussion of whether the mention is a partisan attack, whether "brown noser" is a pejorative, and whether an old high school opinion survey is notable or relevant. As of this writing, "brown noser" stands as does a maybe-mitigating piece of Ryan-as-high-schooler trivia: that he was also voted prom king. But that equilibrium could change, again, in an instant. "Today is the glory day for the Paul Ryan Wikipedia page," writes Garber. "Yesterday, it saw just 10 [edits]. Today, however — early on a Saturday morning, East Coast time — it's already received hundreds of revisions. And the official news of the Ryan selection, of course, is just over an hour old." Now Ryan's page is ready to host debates about biographical details and their epistemological relevance. "Like so many before it, will be a place of debate and dissent and derision. But it will also be a place where people can come together to discuss information and policy and the intersection between the two — a town square for the digital age.""

An anonymous reader writes "I was Ironically foiled by the very subject matter of this article by Slashdot's submission form. CAPTCHA puzzles are a necessary evil to prevent us all from an inbox full of viagra. However, they're inconvenient, inaccessible (for visually impaired users) and machines are getting better at solving them too. How can CAPTCHA puzzles be made more relevant, user-friendly and future-proof? Will they even matter any more in the future? I'm an Undergrad Artificial Intelligence Student and these are my thoughts."Link to Original Source

6031769 (829845) writes "The latest in an increasingly long line of sites which should know better, techradar have informed users of a hashed password leak. Among the details they believe have been stolen include the birthdates of some users. I hope you all claimed to be older/younger than you really are."

bannable (1605677) writes "Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain.

Andrew Y. Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, is cautiously optimistic about neural networks.There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own.